1.2.3-Sarah1281
Brick!Club 1.2.3: The Heroism of Passive Obedience I think I’m a day behind but I can’t just not talk about my favorite chapter. I find it a little strange that the walls are apparently so think that the bishop can call out ‘come in’ and Valjean can hear from outside and obey. It’s a good thing this is a quiet village and there’s not a lot of noise at night or they’d never be able to sleep. To be fair, the bishop had no reason to assume the person at the door was Valjean since people come and go at all hours there but it clearly made no difference. I wonder what he would have said to Magloire had Valjean not knocked just then. We’ve been introduced to him as Jean Valjean. I don’t understand why they keep calling him ‘the man’ or ‘the wayfarer.’ I have to wonder why he even bothered knocking if he’s not even going to try to get them to say yes. I know why he doesn’t have any hope here, of course, but he didn’t have that sort of expression earlier in the evening. Was he feeling masochistic by going to get rejected one more time that night in the place someone assured him no one is ever rejected at? I want to know what he was thinking here besides that they would quickly turn him out so he might as well just tell them the truth now. No matter how frightening he looked, however, I do think that Magloire and Baptistine were overreacting with their mindless terror. He knocked and waited to be told to enter before coming in and everything! Hardly killer behavior. But at least when it says they were frightened they actually act frightened, unlike the people who were so scared they had no problem heaping all sorts of abuse on him. I just love Valjean’s little speech here. It’s so very rambling (reminds me of Javert, I guess those two share that in common sometimes) and innocent and heartbreaking. I get the sense that his treatment had been rattling around in his head until it just burst out of him even when he expected the bishop to kick him out like the rest and not care about his plight. When he just offers up everything he has (which is not much but far too much for lodging for a night, especially the kind of lodging he expects) just to be able to have someplace to sleep…It once again shows he doesn’t really have a proper appreciation of money or long-term planning. If he can’t find work and when he can he is only given half-pay he really can’t afford to be parting with his savings so easily. I’m picturing him having ended up at some Thenardier-type inn and hurting my soul now. He tried to conceal where he came from everywhere else and to the bishop he gives all the gory details about how long he was there and why and that they felt the need to specify him as a particularly dangerous convict. I wish Hugo hadn’t felt the need to hide where he came from. The fact that the bishop heard what he said and immediately asked Magloire to get him a plate and he just could not understand that someone would know the truth and accept him anyway and so he explains again instead of just counting his blessings and going with it…He really needs a hug. Or a million. The bishop might have at least told Valjean that he could stay instead of confirming it through Magloire but he is truly magnificent in this scene. Valjean could have confessed to being Jack the Ripper and the bishop would have invited him in. He just takes everyone as they are and doesn’t sass the truly suffering. He even calls him ‘sir’! He has to know what that means to him, having worked with prisoners before (you know, prisoners like the ones he gives money to but apparently no one else in Digne has ever so much as heard of). And he keeps doing it! And Valjean is just so desperately happy and grateful to be allowed to have dinner and sleep in a bed even before he finds out that all of that is free. I know had I been there at the time and someone was that grateful for something so simple I’d probably start crying. It’s interesting that Valjean, who formerly shook his fist at the Church for having such an unwelcome experience in the town, is much more complimentary of priests when he thinks the bishop is one, saying that a good priest is a good thing and assuming this means that he gets to stay for free. He hates God but seems to have a slightly better opinion of priests. Oh, Valjean is just so proud of that pittance he has, making sure the bishop knows it’s a hundred and nineteen francs and fifteen sous! Why his his life so tragic?!?! Actually, I don’t think ‘the cures who rules over the other cures’ is a bad way to describe a bishop. I know what a bishop is but I’m not sure how I would go about describing one to someone who doesn’t know. I wonder why Valjean thought he had to explain what one was to a priest. Or maybe he was trying to prove that he knew what it was? Valjean doesn’t even know what anything the bishop had was called and he says it’s such a far-off thing to him and…still heartbreakingly tragic! And I can’t believe they pointed cannons at the prisoners here. I wonder if Valjean was just too far back to hear the bishop or if all of the prisoners were kept too far away and not allowed close enough to hear. And the bishop, of course, apparently couldn’t project. But didn’t they all speak in Latin at that point anyway? So I guess it was really no loss. I hadn’t considered that Valjean left the door open because he was expecting a quick exit but I like that interpretation. To think that such a simple thing as being called ‘sir’ means so much to him! I tend to get annoyed whenever people use honorifics with me. Different time and culture but it’s what makes this even more surprising to me. Valjean would probably think that the bishop was a saint solely for letting him stay even if he was selfish in every other aspect of his life. That this means so much to him…and it is no great thing to the bishop who does this all of the time! And Valjean keeps calling everyone he meets ‘monsieur’ and treating them with respect and knowing better than to expect any sort of reciprocation. I love how the bishop sort of invites Valjean to just take whatever he wants since it’s all his anyway. Some people take things more literally than others, you know. I wonder why Valjean was so surprised the bishop knew his name since the innkeeper already told him that he knew and Valjean knew the innkeeper had spread the story around. Perhaps because he heard how everyone else had rejected him and still let him stay? Valjean’s casual litany of things that he has endured is the worst. More repetition that dogs are better off than convicts and I see fellow convicts are listed off as part of the problem. I do wonder why his prison uniform is listed off as one of the things he has suffered. What is so horrible about the uniform anyway? Just the fact it is a prison uniform he always had to wear and makes him look indistinguishable from the rest of the convicts? Or was there something particularly unpleasant about that as opposed to something else he could have worn? Oh, I just realized that those rags he has on now are probably the first real clothes he wore in nineteen years. Probably twenty, actually, since he was in custody for a few months before going to Toulon. Valjean just seem so young here for all that he says he is forty-six. What a waste.